378. Walking Well with Bruce Fertman

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Bruce Fertman:

Elders need to make sure that they pass on what's valuable, and I think that's my main way of serving right now.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard, and I am so excited to share our guest with you today. His name is Bruce Fertman, and he brings 60, yes, 60 years of study as a movement artist and educator. He has trained in gymnastics, modern dance, ballet, contact, improvisation of the Alexander Technique - which I'm sure he's going to tell us what that is because I don't know what it is - Tai Chi, Aikido, Chanoyu, Argentine Tango, and Kyudo. He founded the Alexander Alliance in 1982 in Philadelphia, eventually beginning sister schools in Germany, Switzerland, England, Japan, and Korea in 2019. Bruce began his online learning community, Grace of Sense. He's the author of Teaching by Hand, Learning by Heart, and of The Way In, The Way Out: Renderings of the Tao Te Ching.

Bruce is here to talk about his newest book with Michael Gelb, who we interviewed way back in Episode 199, so I advise you to check that out. It was really great. But this book is called Walking Well: A New Approach for Experiencing Comfort and Vitality in Every Step. Bruce, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is an honor to have you with us today.

Bruce Fertman:

Thank you, Dr. Richard.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So, I did the best I can with your intro. I think I probably butchered a few of those words. But there's a 60-year journey here, and so what I would love for you to do is tell us, really, what put you on that path in some of these seminal moments along your experience that led to what you're doing today.

Bruce Fertman:

Well, okay. I was a rather rambunctious kid, as my mom used to call me, and so I needed to be out a lot and moving. At some point, when I was 12 at summer camps, I was very good at swimming and diving, and I was put as a kind of counselor assistant at the swimming pool and I taught little kids how to swim and dive. And that was the very beginning of me teaching movement, I was 12 years old.

And then, I became a gymnast and I did gymnastics five hours a day every day, as gymnasts do, for about eight years. And I was a scholarship gymnast at Penn State, which was the best team in the country at that time in 1968. And then, I just kept this love for movement going, but I became very interested in the connection between philosophical ideas in relation to movement and also spiritual life in relation to movement.

So, when I read a book called Zen in the Art of Archery, which I many years later began to study, it was the first book where they were studying a very strict physical discipline, but their intention was not athletic. Their intention was spiritual. And then, I thought, "Whoa, that's what I'm looking for." And I spent pretty much the rest of my life in that direction.

I call myself a physiologian, so I am interested in the relationship between physical grace and spiritual grace, and that's been my whole life. That's been kind of a calling and a purpose, and that's how I serve people.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Physiologian is such a fascinating term. So, I know you said it was that first book about the Zen Archery, which I guess, first, tell us what Zen Archery is. And I'd love to learn what your research over these decades has shown you about the relationship between physiological movements and spirituality.

Bruce Fertman:

Well, let me go back before I talk about Kyudo, Zen Archery. Let me say that when I was 12, I was preparing for my bar mitzvah, and I had a very enlightened rabbi, and he said to me, "To know one religion, you really have to know at least two," which made sense. So, he said, "I want you to pick two other religions besides Judaism and learn about them." So, I picked Quakerism and I picked Zen Buddhism.

So, when I first saw a picture of a statue of the Buddha, I looked at him and the first thing I thought, what a beautiful body. Because I was an athlete, I said what a beautifully balanced, well-toned, structurally sound body. And then, I looked and I said, but he's so calm and I'm not. And I said, what is that? What is that? And, is there a relationship between why is he sitting so beautifully? Does that have anything to do with enlightenment? Anything to do with balance not just physically? And that became my interest.

Now, to go to Kyudo, there are many Japanese arts and Chinese arts that are founded on Taoism and Buddhism. So, that's their spiritual anchor. And so, the physical practice is just the body becomes a kind of portal. You study through the body to get to the quality of your life and how you feel inside yourself, how you relate to other people, and how you choose to behave in the world.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is very interesting to me, but it's intuitive on some levels. What's coming to mind as you're talking to me, Bruce, is I can't help but think of the practice of acupuncture, which is rooted in Eastern thinking, but there is a physiological corresponding point in our body to the alleviation of pain oftentimes, right? It's a rebalancing of energy. So, it's not that great of a leap from that to what you're talking about at all. I think there's a lot of parallels. This is really interesting.

Bruce Fertman:

Yes. My approach is to work through movement. Like to bring about inner vitality through how we organize our body from the inside out, so that we actually know how to be balanced physiologically. And how to, in a way, indirectly, regulate our nervous system and our circulatory and respiratory system, so that we can feel good through the day, so we can monitor, we can regulate it. And that's challenging because, in this day and age, we live in a very accelerated culture. Things are moving very quickly. And technology, it's not quick for technology to move that quickly, but it's challenging for human nervous systems, so there's a mismatch.

And I'm interested in people moving at a tempo that allows them to be in resonance with themselves, with other people, and with the world. And walking is actually a metaphor for that. So, it's not just walking around the block, it's how do we walk through our days.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

So, we're kind of leading down this road of now getting into the book, and so I'm curious, before we start talking about Walking Well, what was the reason, what was the impetus that you had for writing this book in the first place? Because you've written a ton, so why this book and why now?

Bruce Fertman:

That's a good question. There's two answers. One is that I'm a very highly trained person. I like practice. I like discipline. I've been doing it all my life in one form or another. And so, I know a lot about the body and I know a lot about movement. And then, the question as I get older - I'm 73- how do I get to the general public? How can I give away what I know? The only way you can save something is to give it away. So, how can I share this knowledge that most people don't have with the general public?

And walking suddenly hit me like, yes, that's what most of us do every day, not necessarily for exercise, but to get here to there. We may not do a lot of it, but we do it. It's a quintessential movement for most humans. So, I thought that's it, that's the way in. And so, that was one impetus for the book.

The second one was, when I was in college and reading a lot, I came across a book called House Made of Dawn, and it was written by a man named Scott Momaday. And he was the first Native American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, he was 35. And in that book, he quotes a poem. A small part of a poem from the Navajo Night Chant, a nine day healing ceremony. And I read that and it just stuck. I said, this is so beautiful. This is important to me. I don't quite know why. It starts out, "In beauty may I walk." It actually starts out House Made of Dawn, in beauty may I walk, and then it goes on. There's one line that says, "In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively may I walk." And I thought, that's it. That is the sentence that encapsulates the entire book.

But it's not just for people who are older, it's for everyone. It's like, how do we let in beauty in our world and find a way of being lively. And to find a way to walk through life, not run through it, to walk like there's a tempo. There's a tempo for speaking, a tempo for moving, a tempo for thinking. And I think a lot of people are missing this tempo. They haven't found this tempo.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is fascinating to me. And what I like about this is you're bringing an awareness. The movie Eyes Wide Shut came to mind, not because of the nature of the movie, but because of the metaphor, walking around with your eyes wide shut, you're not seeing. And so, this almost feels like that Clarendon commercial, you're pulling back the blurry screen and you're able to kind of tap into some new senses just by walking, that you might not have otherwise been aware of.

Bruce Fertman:

That's a good point, because to play off your metaphor, Eyes Wide Shut, we have senses that we were not taught about in school. You could just call it your body sense, but the fancy words are kinesthesia and proprioception, and basically they are the eyes of the body.

Like if you have a stroke and you lose proprioception, let's say, in your arm. If you're not looking at your arm, you may not know where it is, and therefore, it could either be floating around somewhere doing its own thing. Or, you feel the rest of your body, but you just somehow don't quite know where it is. And then, when you look at it, it's like, "Really? Is that my arm? It looks like a prosthesis." So, that's a loss of body sense. That's a loss of like, "Oh, that's mine. That belongs to my body. Oh, I have control of removing it. It's connected to my brain and so on."

So, the way a person who hasn't experienced that kind of thing would experience it as, if you fall asleep and you're on your arm in a weird way, and your arm completely falls asleep, you might wake up for a moment and have no idea where your arm is, and that's a loss of body sense.

So, there's a wonderful man who wrote about it named Oliver Sacks, and he wrote a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. The third chapter is about a woman who loses her proprioception. It's a wonderful chapter. It tells you what this sense is about and I recommend it for people who are curious about those senses.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I believe the title of the book is in reference to a man that had a stake through his head somehow. Is that right?

Bruce Fertman:

If I remember correctly, yes, he was interested in people who lost certain functions and then how they compensated for the loss of a particular function.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah. So, let's talk with a little bit of depth about Walking Well, so walk me through what somebody is going to get out of experientially reading this book.

Bruce Fertman:

Well, the first thing is that it's actually a method. So, it's not just little tips like lift your knees higher, or hold your shoulders back, or swing your arms, or something like that. There's a sequence and there's a logic, an organic logic to the methodology.

So, the approach that we take is that you don't have to learn how to walk. I'm watching a little girl, a baby, well, I don't know, she's almost a toddler, she's a year old, and she's just on the cusp of walking. I didn't have to teach her how to walk. No one has taught her how to walk. She knows exactly what she has to do to get to the point where she can walk. It's innate. It is given. It's a gift. And it just takes humans a bit of time to get there.

So, our approach is we don't have to teach a person the right way to walk. We have to get people to stop doing all the things that makes walking more difficult for them. And underneath all that, when you stop all that stuff, the result is that you tap into your body's knowledge of how to walk, that your body knows how to walk.

So, how do we do that might be the next question. So, the answer to that question would be to start with your feet. We start with a person's feet. And the reason we do that is, biomechanically, that's where it starts. You can't take one step without the ground. It's just impossible. I tell people, walking is not an action. It's an interaction. In fact, every single "action" that we take is not an action. It's an interaction, always. 

So, you're sitting, so you may think, "Oh. I'm sitting." But, no. You're interacting with your chair, right? If I take this cup and hold it in my hand, that's an interaction. It's always an interaction.

So, the very first thing to get people to understand is that you're not doing this by yourself. You are not the only source of power. It's this interaction with the ground, with gravity in the ground that allows you to walk. And so, what happens down there? Like, what actually is supposed to happen down there with your feet? That's where we begin. And then, we work with the feet, and then that affects the ankles, and that changes the legs, and that starts to move the pelvis in a certain way. And then, the pelvis starts to move in a certain way and the hands start to move in opposition to the pelvis. And then, when all that movement is happening, the organs are being moved dramatically.

Walking is a very large whole body movement. And so, we teach it from the ground up. Energy is a kind of rippling action that happens from the ground up and spirals the body upward, we call them ascending spirals. And that's how we go about it. It's really quite logical.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

And I know this is in method, like you said, it's not a series of little tips. So, are there signposts along the way to where as you're going through this method, like, "Aha. I've kind of unlocked something new here," and then what happens from there? So, talk about that a little bit.

Bruce Fertman:

Okay. So, let's start further back. So, one of the things that's really important in learning how to move well - see, it's so much about stopping things - is to know how to stop a preoccupation with how you look, what I call the cosmetic body or the appearance body. People are so concerned with what their bodies look like that they're not experiencing what their bodies are. And the first step is to realize that to move well, you have to stop caring about what you look like.

So, other animals don't know what they look like, right? We have dogs. Our dogs do not know what they look like. They don't. Can you imagine not knowing what you look like? How you would move if you had no idea what you look like? You didn't have an idea like, "Oh, I'm too tall," "Oh, I'm too short," "Oh, I'm too fat," "Oh, I'm too skinny," "Oh, my butt is too big," "Oh, this, and this, and this." They don't know what age they are. They don't "Oh, I can't walk like that. I'm too old." They don't know what age they are. They don't know what gender they are. They don't say, "Oh, well, a female dog should move like this," "Oh, a male dog should move like this." So, they don't have any of this baggage. They don't wear clothes. They don't restrict their bodies that way.

So, how would I move? How would I walk down the street if I had no idea of my age, my gender, what I look like? It would all really be different. You see? So, this is this stripping away of what we have been taught. It's a kind of unlearning. So, that's the only way you can discover your animal body, because we are animals. So, the only way you can learn to move the way we are designed to move is to tap into your animal body. And to do that, you have to get rid of your cultural body, you have to get rid of your social body. And so, we talk a lot about that in the book.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Yeah. I mean, you can really see now how this ties deeply into a spiritual component in view of self. I mean, obviously, this book is the result of more than 50 years of experience doing these things and it's put all together. But I am curious, based on your experience, when somebody goes through this journey of using this method on a regular basis, share some things, not only physiologically, but emotionally or spiritually that one could expect to encounter, to experience.

Bruce Fertman:

I'm happy to. This is the whole kind of purpose of the book. The way we start out is we want people to be comfortable, physically comfortable. Because if we're struggling - and this is not possible for everyone - most people can increase their level of physical comfort dramatically if they learn how to use their body according to its design. So, we want people to be comfortable because we want people to feel pleasure when they're walking, because then that encourages people to walk just organically. They don't have to say, "Oh, my God. I have to go for a walk." It's like they want to because they're experiencing a lot of pleasure. So, that's the first step, is to get people comfortable.

And if people just went that far, if you read part one of the book, you're going to be more comfortable walking. If a person puts the book down there, mazel tov, congratulations, you know how to walk more comfortably. That's great.

And then, the second part is about generating vitality. Now, you can't generate vitality just by your will and your muscles just like working hard because actually that tires you out. That doesn't generate vitality. Vitality is generated when you're moving so well in such a coordinated way, with no resistance, with no interference that you start to feel vigorous because there's no resistance. It's like you're tapping into a current and there's no resistance, and so you're really moving. It's a little bit like most people try to get their vitality by putting their foot further down on the gas pedal. We teach people to take a foot that they don't even know is on the break, and take the foot off the break. That's all. If that foot comes off the break, people start to go, "Whoa, I am really moving." So, that's how we get to the vitality.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I love that analogy.

Bruce Fertman:

Now, let's go the next step. So, you start to feel this vitality, what happens is you start breathing better. Now, breath is very important to us because our brain needs a terrific amount of oxygen. It uses about 20 percent of all our oxygen, so it needs to get up there and it needs enough to get into our system. And when that happens, you can see the sequence. Can you see it? The comfort, the vitality, and then this is the inspiration part, because then the brain starts working, and we have such wonderful brains, and it's getting fed. The brain is getting fed and stimulated, and then ideas come up. And that's why we tell people, do not go for a walk without a little notepad and a pencil, because when the idea comes up, write it down right away. Don't wait, because you get home and go, "What was that idea?"

So, when we were writing this book, Michael and I walked miles every day and we brought our notebooks, and we wrote the whole book walking, basically, and then we come back. That's how we wrote the book. We wrote the book walking. We were walking our talk literally.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Literally. That's fantastic.

Bruce Fertman:

Yes. So, that works that way.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

This is great. Before we close, just because I said I'd ask you and I just want to make sure we get it, what's the Alexander Technique?

Bruce Fertman:

Ah, okay. Well, it's beautiful. I'll tell you, I've studied it since I was 19 years old, I'm 73, and it's been a love affair. I love the work. I had a very gifted teacher, her name was Marjorie Barstow. She was born in 1899. She taught until 1995. I studied with her from 1976 to 1991, so it was long. It's not like a weekend workshop.

And Alexander started out with a certain amount of performance anxiety that affected his voice, and he wanted to work through those problems. And in the process, he realized that his voice was not isolated from the rest of his body and from his mind. So, he just began to study himself so thoroughly that he figured out how to function really well, physically and mentally. And at some point, people got interested, doctors got interested, and actors got interested.

And then, he moved to England and he just had a whole career around this subject. And at some point, he realized that he could use his hands to help people get rid of this kind of interference that they were imposing on their natural bodies. And his hands got so good, he could just bring people into balance so easily.

And then, my teacher was like that, because she was the first person that Alexander certified to teach. So, I got that skill, too, after many years. And Michael trained to be an Alexander teacher as well. We met studying with Marjorie Barstow in 1976. It goes way back. And so, we wanted to try, we can't use our hands in this book, but we have thought about it for so long and our language has developed, and we said, what can we get through to people via a book? And you know what? We were happily surprised. We have people that have worked through this material without contact with us and they're making progress. They're feeling substantial difference just from the book. So, we're feeling pretty good about that.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

Well, Bruce, you know, we could probably spend a whole nother episode talking about the Alexander Technique. I have found this conversation to be so fascinating. The book again, Walking Well: A New Approach for Experiencing Comfort and Vitality in Every Step, is available everywhere. 

But as you know, I wrap up every episode by asking my guests just a single question, and that is, what is your biggest helping? That one most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with - no pun intended - after hearing our conversation today.

Bruce Fertman:

Well, I have to answer it in a two-fold way. At my age, I consider myself a young elder because my teachers taught into their 90s and even some into their 100s, so I'm pretty young at 73. But I'm very ambitious for other people. I'm not very ambitious for myself. I've lived a really full life. I've had a wonderful career. Now, a lot of younger people are helping me in my work and I am so ambitious for them. I want them to do well. So, I had a rabbi I studied with, Zalman Schachter, he wrote a book called From Age-ing to Sage-ing. And I think elders need to make sure that they pass on what's valuable, and I think that's my main way of serving right now.

The other thing that is important is this book, because Michael and I know so much about human movement in relation to the quality of life that we want to give that away as a present to people, and so that's another way that we're trying to serve.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

I love this. Bruce, tell us where people can learn more about you online.

Bruce Fertman:

To learn more about me, just go to brucefertman.com. To learn more about Michael, go to michaelgelb.com. To learn about the book, to take an online course, a live online course that Michael and I are now teaching, go to walkingwell.com, walkingwell.com.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

And we'll have everything Bruce Fertman, Michael Gelb, and Walking Well in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. I have absolutely loved our conversation today. Thank you so much for spending time with us.

Bruce Fertman:

You're welcome.

Dr. Richard Shuster:

And to each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this, I want to thank you as well. If you like what you heard, if you're inspired, if you're going to go start walking well today, go give us a follow and a five-star review on your podcast app of choice, because this is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.